Overthinking It

Will the 2014 Yankees Have the Oldest Offense Ever?

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You have to hand it to the Yankees. Fresh off a 2013 season in which they fielded baseball’s oldest collection of position players—and, in perhaps not entirely unrelated news, either led the league or ranked second in games and salary lost to injury and percentage of payroll lost—they’ve spent the offseason growing even grayer.

On the pitching side, the Yankees figure to be a lot less ancient. Having lost Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte to retirement, New York could enter the season with only one post-prime reliever (Matt Thornton) and three under-30 starters, barring a buzzer-beating Bronson Arroyo signing. But with every lineup slot assigned to someone who’s fit for Carrousel—unlike last year, when Brett Gardner played most of the season at age 29—the Yankees have seemingly assembled a historically old offense.

The oldest hitting team in the AL era (1901-2013) was the 2006 Giants, with a weighted batter age of 34.46. That team featured only one starter under 30—27-year-old catcher Eliezer Alfonso, backed up by 35-year-olds Mike Matheny and Todd Greene—and got over 2000 combined plate appearances out of 41-year-olds Barry Bonds and Steve Finley and 39-year-olds Omar Vizquel and Moises Alou. The next season, Brian Sabean cemented a now-outdated reputation for being irrationally attached to veterans by trying to construct a roster around an even older Bonds. The 2007 Giants gave enough plate appearances to 20-something bench bats to lower their weighted average batter age to 33.54—the second­-oldest of the AL era—but their youngest starter was Bengie Molina, who turned 33 that July. In Bonds’ final season, San Francisco won only 71. For teams of a certain age, success is tough to sustain.

Here are the 10 oldest hitting teams of this 113-season span, along with team TAv and winning percentage:

Year

Team

Avg. Age

Tav

Winning %

Playoffs?

2006

Giants

34.46

.260

.472

No

2007

Giants

33.54

.252

.438

No

1998

Orioles

33.34

.276

.488

No

2012

Yankees

32.96

.280

.586

Yes

1945

Tigers

32.87

N/A

.575

Yes

2005

Giants

32.64

.253

.463

No

2003

Giants

32.62

.277

.621

Yes

1999

Orioles

32.58

.273

.481

No

2002

Giants

32.55

.284

.590

Yes

1982

Angels

32.46

.282

.574

Yes

Five of the top 10 were built around Bonds, whose aging curve was…atypical, to put it politely. And five of the 10 (including two of the Bonds teams) were winning clubs that made the playoffs, which offers some hope to Yankees fans who are still reeling from a catastrophic season in which their team still won more than most.

So where will the 2014 Yankees rank? Our preliminary depth charts put their position players at 33.59 years old—almost three years older than the Phillies, who have the second-oldest group, and eight years older than the Astros.

Team

Projected 2014 Batting Age

Yankees

33.59

Phillies

30.76

Red Sox

30.42

Rays

29.97

Dodgers

29.82

***

Marlins

27.50

Braves

27.25

Mariners

26.95

Cubs

26.86

Astros

25.61

We’ll be tinkering with our depth charts up until Opening Day, just as teams will be tinkering with their rosters. The Yankees, for one, are reportedly pursuing 27-year-old Logan Forsythe, who would lower their average age slightly. But as of today, Brian Cashman’s club projects to have the second-oldest hitters of the AL era, sandwiched between the ’06 and ’07 Giants. (Had A-Rod not been suspended, their projected average age would have come within a couple tenths of a year of the top spot.) If the Yankees approach this projection and manage to make the postseason, they’ll have done so with an older collection of position players than any previous playoff team.

It’s easy to point out the problems with this approach to roster construction. As Nate Silverobserved in 2009, “the steepest part of the aging curve—when a hitter experiences the most manifest decline in his abilities—tends to come between ages 32 and 34,” a range within which the collective age of the Yankees’ lineup falls. And as anyone who watched last year’s team could tell you, age is closely correlated with injury risk. Not only are the Yankees’ hitters likely to decline, but they’re much more likely to miss time than those of a younger team with the same true talent. I wrote something similar about the aging Phillies prior to the 2012 season, and they’ve won at a .475 clip since then.

As an illustration, let’s estimate the relative injury risks of two teams, one whose position players are the age of the Astros’, and another whose position players are as old as the Yankees’. A recent study suggested that injury risk rises approximately linearly as players age, with an increase of two percentage points per year in the probability of making a trip to the DL. The Astros’ projected average age rounds to 27, so let’s set the baseline DL probability for a 27-year-old position player at 10 percent. (I’m making that up.) At that rate, the odds of a lineup of nine 27-year-olds making it through the season without disabling anyone are 38.7 percent.

The Yankees’ offense’s projected average age rounds to 34; by the time a 27-year-old position player reaches age 34, his odds of visiting the DL—using my made-up baseline—are up to 24 percent. The probability that a lineup of nine 34-year-olds makes it through the season without a DL trip is only 8.2 percent, which means that the odds of the lineup of 27-year-olds surviving unscathed are almost five times higher. And that understates the true difference, since A) real teams have more than nine position players, and B) that injury study both suffers from survivor bias and treats every DL appearance the same, ignoring that the older player’s DL stint is likely to last longer. If you’re in the mood for some math, you can calculate the probability that each roster will suffer, say, at least two, three, or four DL trips, but the takeaway is that the Astros—who lost the third-fewest days to injury in 2013—are much more likely to stay healthy (even though they’ll still stink).

Given where they were at the end of last season, it’s hard to see how the Yankees could have gotten significantly younger over the winter without punting 2014, something their unique competitive ecology doesn’t allow them to do. They had no impact players to promote from within, leaving them with little choice but to fill holes with free agents, who tend to be past their primes. By failing to develop their own productive players, the Yankees have locked themselves into a pattern of replacing their own old, expensive ex-players with old, expensive ex-players from other teams.

Which isn’t to say that this approach can’t work for a team with as much money to spend as the Steinbrenners’. It worked for the 2012 Yankees, who won 95 games with a +136 run differential and made it to the ALCS despite being the fourth-oldest batting team of the AL era (with an average weighted age of 32.96). That year, too, Yankees players missed the second-most days due to injury, but a much lower percentage of their payroll went to waste, as more of the important positional personnel made it through the season intact and good pitching picked up the slack. This year’s team looks less talented: even if disaster doesn’t strike, the old offense projects to be the sixth-worst in the AL, the bullpen doesn’t seem dominant, and the back of the rotation remains up in the air. And as long as the Yankees continue to construct rosters this way, they’ll be subject to considerable downside risk from the sort of injury stacks that plagued them last season.

If the Yankees undershoot their age projection this year, it will probably be because they can’t keep their most senior citizens on the field. Last year’s Yankees lost so many of their stars for extended stretches that they were forced to import a steady stream of replacement players from Triple-A and outside the organization. Most of those players were younger than the injured veterans whose roster spots they took, which lowered the team’s average age, but they were also less talented, which lowered the team’s win total. That leaves the Yankees in the paradoxical position of hoping for a historically old offense: the older the batters, the better they’ll be.

Possible counter take here is that of the 10 oldest teams listed, 5 made the playoffs.

If the underlying point is the downside the numbers - on the surface anyway - seem to suggest the possibility of the opposite. I'd think most teams - Yanks perhaps excluded given that "unique competitive ecology" - would be happy to enter the season with a 50/50 shot at the playoffs.

Also surprised only 1 WWII era team hit the list. And that 8 of 10 were in the last 15 years. Cue the steroid comments - but I'd think the added emphasis on conditioning, nutrition, etc has as much to offer here.

Last Spring, I penned this article (in my head). As a Yankees fan, missing the playoffs seemed inevitable given the mere age of the ballclub. And I didn't understand why the punditry (even the more analytically-inclined) seemed to rate them as contenders.

This year, for no logical reason, I'm not as concerned. It's probably because Ellsbury and Beltran are shiny new toys, and if I squint hard enough at their career stats, I can ignore the very checkered injury history each of them brings.

But it's also likely due to an overall better feeling about the direction of the club. They made what I believe to be the right decision in letting Cano walk. And there is maybe, just possibly, a chance that A-Rod won't be back.